The year 2009 has witnessed some drastic changes at the Department for International Development (DFID) including re-branding itself to UKAID. The presentation of the 2009 white paper, “Building Our Common Future” outlines the measures that are being slowly adopted by the agency to bring about better transparency, effectiveness and accountability in its funding. With these new changes, DFID is reiterating its commitment for implementing the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action. These agreements spelt out the need for donors to bring about transparency and accountability in their programmes by allowing citizens to access information about them easily.
As part of this commitment, DFID has now developed the database of its programmes and projects online and anybody with internet access can find information about them. Projects and programmes can be searched or browsed by country or by sector. Each project has been furnished with basic information such as its approach, geographical focus, themes, budgets, timeline and also cross-cutting themes such as gender and HIV/AIDS.
It seems that the database is still in the process of getting updated since many of the recent DFID-funded projects were not listed in it. However, we hope this will be done soon and will be a great leap for understanding the flow of aid and its impact in developing countries leading to more accountability on the part of the recipient country as well. The database can be accessed at this link.
